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Verbing Weirds Google
MoNickels writes "Back in January, the American Dialect Society voted the neologism "to google" as the most useful word of 2002. Now bring on the lawyers! Google's have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paul McFedries, creator of the famous Word Spy site, demanding he remove google as a verb from his lexicon, or else. Frank Abate, an American editor for the Oxford English Dictionary, points out, however, that you can't claim proprietary rights to a verb." Update: 02/26 03:19 GMT by T : MoNickels writes with an update: "Frank Abate is not
an editor of the OED, but he is a former editor of the New Oxford
American Dictionary, both published by Oxford University Press." Thanks for the amendment!
Back in the day, Xerox fought the use of 'xerox' as, to 'xerox' something being equivilent to photocopying. They had a point, same as Google does, to prevent watering down their trademark.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Google is just fine with Josh on The West Wing telling Donna to "go Google it", but they're terrified once it goes into print.
What I wonder is this - did Google ever just ask the site to take it down nicely? Did they just go straight to the cease-and-desist order? And if they did, is this for some indisputable legal "we'll look like dicks, but..." reason? I'd hate to see a chink in the "we're all for them" online armor they have right now.
Schnapple
Might the title have been taken from that one Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin talks about how he likes to verb words? One of the last lines is "Verbing weirds language"
Hmm. Just curious.
**Admits to being a total C&H fanatic**
-- n
1. The English language has a verb, google. It is new, but it is in widespread use, and this can be documented.
The English language has a noun, google, as well. It means 10^100, and has been around longer than Google (the trademark). I wonder if they want to have this use removed from the dictionary as well?
Seriously though, what is their problem? Every time someonw says 'to google' instead of 'to search' it is re-enforcing the idea that using Google is the same as searching, and this is the very best for of viral marketing they can have. Imagine if Hoover objected to people referring to operating a vacuum cleaner as 'hoovering'.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, Hormel has given up on the spam thing. They used to say that it was OK to use the work in lower case to refer to junk email, but would actively contact and even threaten folks using it in its capitalized form. However, they've apparently decided that any publiclity is good publicity.
i ed-ad-engine-not-a-search-engine will call their offerings "Googlers" or something similar. Which would be a moral victory for Google, but perhaps a commercial disaster.
Google's intent here is clearly to protect their trademark -- they don't really have a choice. If they aquiesce and agree that "to google" is a generic word and not a brand reference, you can bet that Inktomi and Overture-those-fraudulent-bastards-it's-a-classif
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
This is just a "request" from a lawyer:
"....We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of
"google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the
trademark status of Google."
Lawyers do this all time. You have the option of saying "No".
It is NOT a Cease and Desist letter.
thanks Timothy for more FUD.
Hormel has stated that people can use the term spam to refer to junk mail as long as they don't capitalize it, so I think Google should do the same (so the verb would be "to google", not "to Google").
"Google" might be a trademark, but "google" isn't. A good example is "Ford" - the motor company, versus "ford" - a shallow place in a body of water that can be crossed (forded) easily :-)
google
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
--Googling pp.
I can't believe this is being called a "cease and desist" letter. What is the deal with this bottom-sucking sensationalism? The letter simply said, look, that's our trademark, and we want you to either reference it adequately or remove it. It's since been referenced. Now, if Google doesn't think it's been referenced adequately enough, you might expect a second letter, which, if not followed up properly, might turn into a future cease and desist letter... but geez, this one was hardly threatening, and, as far as I know about copyright law, it was well within Google's rights to request that he reference their trademark.
I suppose it's too much to ask for the submissions to not always have the aura of inane paranoia...
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course, 'noone' isn't part of the American language... :-) j/k
... and on Buffy. More than once I've heard Willow say something about "googling for [insert mystic sounding stuff here]".
actually, the c&d letter alternatively asked him to note that "Google" is a of Google Technology Inc. Which is what he appears to have done.
Naturally, the submitter above chose to ignore that and focus on the "please remove" part of the letter.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
William Gibson's new book, "Pattern Recognition", uses google as a verb quite extensively.
Gotta go now, gotta get a klenex.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
The /. story seems to me to greatly exagerate the facts.
The letter is a polite request - not a 'cease-and-desist'. All that they ask is that the dictionary entry acknowledge their trademark:
We ask that you help us to protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google" found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account the trademark status of Google
Do they have the right to demand this? According to one of the links in the story, probably not. It is polite and sensible for Word Spy to do this? Yes. Have they done this? Yes:
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Trademarks (in the US at least) tend to be divided by courts into four strengths in the US. The strongest are made-up words, then the next strongest are regular words applied to product competely unrelated to the word. In other words, "Linux" or "Coca-Cola" are very strong marks because they are made up words. "Google" might be construed as a made up word, and thus very strong. But even if "Google" is interpreted as just a form of the math term "googol", it is still strong because it isn't applied to math. Thats how people can trademark regular english words with almost the same strength as a made up word. But I couldn't trademark "Red Apple" brand apples easily or at all because it just describes what it is.
The problem is that if Google doesn't actively protect their mark and it becomes a word on it's own, then in effect the word "Google" just describes "Google" because it is a word with it's own meaning, refering to a type of search engine. Then they lose the ability to renew their trademark and prevent others from using it.
So then I would be able to create www.googleit.com or www.gogoogle.com. That wouldn't be very good for their business.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Google is a play on the word "googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol is a very large number. There isn't a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information available on the web.
(from Google's Corporate History)
Cue The Sun...
No.
When Apple first formed as such, they were involved in a trademark dispute with the British recording label Apple (the Beatles label, BTW). They settled because Apple Computer would be in a different business. (For more, search on 'Apple+sosumi'.) Furthermore, it has also been resolved that 'Apple' can not be used as a trademark when selling the actual fruit.
Google does NOT mean to search for something online. Check here or your closest paper dictionary. In the vernacular it has come to mean search in much the same way xerox has come to mean copy documents, kleenex has come to mean tissue, and scotch tape has come to mean transparent tape.
Ergo, if another internet search engine uses the term 'google' it would be as much as fault as a copier company advertising with the word 'xerox'. The fact that 'Word Spy' has noted that it is now in common use to mean search is irrelavent.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
As of a few minutes ago, the WordSpy definition is:
(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
So he did what Google asked: noted that it was a trademark. The site's still up. The definition's still valid. Presumably the Google lawyers are happy. I don't feel my civil or lexical rights have been trounced upon.
As has often been said...move along folks, nothin' to see here.
Cue The Sun...
Ironically, according to what I've read in the retail industry, one of the best things that can happen to your brand is that it become colloquially accepted as the overall term for a group of products.
;P
ie:
a "coke" instead of a carbonated beverage
a "thermos" rather than a... err a thermal flask?
a "kleenex" instead of a paper tissue
On the otherhand... according to this the quickest way to lose your copyright is to have your brand perceived as a generic term.
By the way, I found the above article by googli^U^U^U using the search engine Google®.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
a colleague of mine used to work in a canning factory.
you want to know why the spam fills the can, and there is no "juice" that falls out when you open it?
because they cook it in the can.
the ingredients go in, they seal it, then they cook it.
mmm mmm good. D: